Team Sky's Rigoberto Uran is in the white jersey after stepping into Bradley Wiggins' shoes. Photograph: Nicolas Bouvy/EPA

Bradley Wiggins got back on his bike on Friday. "Just a short ride," Dave Brailsford said, waiting in the shade of a plane tree in the centre of Saint-Gaudens opposite the Team Sky bus before the start of the 14th stage of the Tour de France. "But the fact that he's on the bike again is good."

The abrupt departure of Sky's candidate for the Tour's overall classification, heading for hospital with a broken collarbone after a crash on stage eight, inevitably forced the team principal into a swift and radical reappraisal of tactics. The reaction, however, was very different from that of 12 months ago, when Wiggins' mystifying race-long under-performance threw the whole effort into disarray.

"Last year when we lost Bradley – which is in effect what happened, although in a different way – we were all a bit lost," Brailsford admitted. "This year there's far more resilience."

Despite the disappointments of the team's Tour debut, this year the effort was again built around Wiggins, based on Brailsford's stated ambition to get a British rider on to the top step of the podium in Paris within five years. "Some people said we were being unrealistic," he said. "But Bradley was in such good shape that he was a real contender here. Given the way this race has been going, he'd have gone damn close. It's given the team a belief."

While the shock of Wiggins' demise was still reverberating, Brailsford pushed the button marked Plan B. "This year we definitely had one, and it was two-pronged. The first priority was to get out there and be active in the stages. We're building a strong fan base and when they turn on the television, if they see a Sky jersey up at the front then it makes everybody happy.

"So we told the other riders: 'Look, you came here to work for a leader, but now you're freed up and you ought to see this as an opportunity to do something you wouldn't have had the chance to do if Bradley had still been here.' That got them refocused.

"It was very important the next day [after Wiggins' accident] to get out on the front foot and get somebody in the break, and Xabi Zandio did a fantastic job. Then at the end [Juan Antonio] Flecha attacked. So it was quite a buoyant day."

The following day Flecha was knocked down by a French TV car while leading the break. "Then it was Geraint Thomas's turn and he did an epic ride in the mountains, the sort of thing that takes real courage," Brailsford said. "On Friday we wanted to get Edvald [Boasson Hagen] in the break but it was so fast and hard right from the gun that by the time he actually got himself up there, he'd spent a lot of energy and when they hit the climb he was a little bit short. But we've been in the mix every day."

The second part of the tactical rethink involved slotting Rigoberto Uran, the team's 24-year-old Colombian, into the hole left by Wiggins. "We've got a lot of staff and sports scientists who'd worked hard to create a real plan of attack for this race for Bradley," Brailsford said. "So dropping Rigoberto into that role actually kept the staff focused instead of thinking all their work had gone to waste.

"It's a development opportunity, taking a negative and making it into a positive. Rigoberto will come out of this Tour having learnt a damn sight more than maybe he would have done. And we'll find out if our plan was a good one."

If there has been a sign that the team is still on a learning curve when it comes to the complexities and uncertainties of a three-week grand tour, it was perhaps the decision to hold Thomas back, along with the other riders, in the vain hope of helping the fallen Wiggins.

But Uran placed fifth in the tough finish on the Plateau de Beille, taking the white jersey, and his 11th place in the general classification is just one of Sky's achievements midway through their second Tour. Boasson Hagen secured the team's first stage win in the race the day before Wiggins's accident, Thomas held the white jersey for five days and won a combativity prize after leading the race up the Tourmalet, while Zandio again showed well on in the early stages of Saturday's ascent.

"It was a super day for us," Brailsford said last night. "We've worked for a long time on the idea that the goalposts move and life isn't always fair. When the goalposts do move, don't worry about it."